A Dozen Angels

Volunteers` Good Works Carry The Christmas Spirit Throughout The Year

December 29, 1991|By Mary Beth Sammons.

Each year during the holiday season, the generosity of friends, family, co-workers and neighbors shines brightly through gift-giving, cards with warm and merry messages, and little acts of kindness, gestures sometimes forgotten or overlooked during the rest of the year.

Such gestures of friendship and giving are not limited to the holidays, though, for these 12 northwest suburban folks.

They are just a dozen of the region`s year-round volunteers, those whose extraordinary generosity of spirit and concern for others carries the true meaning of the season far beyond the winter holiday and into the 12 months of the new year, every year.

Ginger Esler

When Ginger Esler was 15-years old, she contracted polio, a disease that ravaged her body, robbing her of movement below the neck and sentencing her to life on a respirator for her every breath.

Never mind that some would label this now-46-year-old Bensenville woman physically handicapped. Her spirit shines brightly, for she has earned her wings in works of wonder and compassion for those she considers even less fortunate than herself.

She is confined to bed almost 24 hours a day-in recent years arthritis has progessively worsened her condition so that it is painful to sit in a wheelchair. And the 1977 van that provided her ticket to freedom the one day a week she could afford an aide recently gave out on her.

Nevertheless, Esler recruits and oversees a team of 12 volunteers who lend their time, companionship and friendship to elderly northwest suburban persons whose physical illnesses or deteriorating mental capacities left them in the same sorry state as Esler: housebound.

The program is called the Community Companion Volunteers and is sponsored by Lutheran Community Services for the Aged in Arlington Heights. Since it was founded in 1988, it has served 157 families in the northwest suburbs and Lake County.

Linked to the outside world by her telephone, Esler`s job is to find and schedule training for the volunteers, match them with seniors needing the companion service and ensure that the relationship between volunteer and the needy develops smoothly.

It is no small task. Esler, who three years ago lost her full-time post as a rehabilitation counselor for the handicapped because of funding cutbacks, has made the volunteer work into a full-time avocation, saying she does so

``because it is important for all of us to feel we are doing something meaningful for others. We`re all put here to do the best we can do, even if we have limitations.``

Sheila Just and George Bedingfield

``Sheila and George! Sheila and George! Yeah, you`re here,`` shout the 200-plus persons gathered curbside at a bus stop in one of Chicago`s most poverty-stricken neighborhoods on the West Side. The crowd erupts in cheers and clapping as they spot the red van.

The families on the corner are among the hundreds of inner city residents whose lives have been changed by Arlington Heights residents Sheila Just and George Bedingfield, a fiftyish set of pals (they along with their respective spouses met at St. Edna`s Catholic Church).

The two make the trek from the suburbs to this bus stop near the Henry Horner projects every Sunday year-round, arriving with their mobile good-works center-The Westside Community Center-which is housed in their van.

From that van they dole out hundreds of bags of clothing, non-perishable foods and other goodies for those who otherwise have little or nothing. All the items are donated, thanks in large part to Just and Bedingfield`s infectious urging, by members of northwest suburban churches and

organizations.

Just and Bedingfield were inspired to start the weekly visits six years after they began donating their time to help out in a Chicago soup kitchen. Four years later, they decided it was time to do more to meet the mammoth need. And so they put their charity efforts on wheels.

Today, they also make frequent visits to the Rand Grove apartment complex in unincorporated Palatine, where the underprivileged struggle to survive in the suburbs.

Says Sheila Just: ``We try to give to everyone who has the need-drug addicts, prostitutes, whomever. Our creed is that there isn`t anyone that is all bad, and so we give to the good in each person. And they give us back the only thing they have-friendship, confidence and trust. We`re the ones who receive the gifts from these beautiful people.``

Judy Feinglass

Several years ago, Elk Grove resident Judy Feinglass received what at the time seemed an unusual request from the coordinator for a Meals on Wheels program she was donating some of her extra time to.

One of the seniors Judy was delivering meals to had just lost her dog and was feeling kind of down. Could Judy bring her two dogs with her, just this once on her meal trek, the program coordinator asked? Why not, she thought.